Cabbie Claims Red-Faced Man Punched Him in the Face for Being Indian

Police were called to Belltown in the wee hours of the morning Sunday, October 30 to investigate an alleged assault, after a cab driver was reportedly punched by a man in slacks with a red-painted face, who wanted to know his country of origin.

According to the police report, a man and his girlfriend left Belltown’s 5-Point Café, hailed a Yellow Cab, and told the driver he needed to get to West Seattle. But as the cab driver pulled away from the curb, the man reportedly asked him “where he was from,” the police report states.

To which the driver responded, “India, do you still want to go?”

“According to [the victim], [the suspect] then struck him on the right side of his face, in his eye,” the report states, exited the cab quickly, according to a witness, and fled down an alley with his girlfriend. The report notes that the alleged punch broke the cabbie’s wire-rimmed glasses, causing the right socket to be “cut and swollen…the right eye had a clot on it.”

Naturally, the driver told police that he thought the man “hit him because he was from India.”

Thanks to the suspect’s glaringly red face, police easily located him on 400 block of Wall Street and took him into custody. The report notes that the suspect’s hands were bloody and there were cuts on his left hand. The cab driver positively identified the suspect and told police that his taxi’s surveillance camera most likely captured the alleged attack. The suspect was booked into King County Jail and is being investigated for assault and malicious harassment.